“Nice Work If You Can Get It” coming to Mount Greylock Regional High School

Mount Greylock Regional School District will perform its annual musical theater production on Friday and Saturday, March 18 and 19, 2016, at 7 PM at the ’62 Centre for Theatre and Dance at Williams College.

This year it is the musical, Nice Work If You Can Get It, in a fresh (2012) presentation of the music of George and Ira Gershwin, with a book by Tony Award winning author Joe Di Pietro, based on works by Guy Bolton and PG Wodehouse.

Set in New York in the 1920s, the show tells the story of a band of bootleggers run by the illusive Brownbeard (senior Molly Wilson), looking for a place to stash a shipment of illegal gin. Billie (senior Nicole Jones), the leader of this small band of hoods encounters society playboy Jimmy Winter (junior Whit Ellingwood) outside of a speakeasy, and hatches a plot to store the hooch in the basement of his seldom used beach house on Long Island. As the stash is unloaded, Jimmy and his new bride Eileen (senior Maggie Rorke) arrive, setting in motion a series of madcap events that result in Jimmy’s falling in love with Billie, a straight-laced prohibitionist “duchess” (junior Jenna Benzinger) who falls for one of Billie’s bootlegging accomplices (Cookie, played by junior John Pfister), the appearance of a bevy of chorus girls led by the “very available” Jeannie Muldoon (sophomore Cedar Keyes), and the intervention of conservative, moralist Senator Max Evergreen (senior Noah Savage), who in the end learns that he is at the center of a secret that could derail his chances for re-election.

With classic songs from the Gershwin songbook, whose melodies are prominently interwoven into the fabric of American popular culture, such as Nice Work If You Can Get It, S’Wonderful, Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off, Someone to Watch Over Me, and the liltingly plaintive But Not For Me, this show has proven to be a delight for all audiences.

This production involves over 40 members of the Mount Greylock student body as actors, singers, pit musicians, and crew members, and is directed for the 17th season by faculty member Jeffrey Welch, with vocal direction by Jean Kirsch, choreography by Ann Marie Rodriguez, and the pit orchestra is directed by Lyndon Moors. Tickets are $6 for students and seniors and $8 for adults, and they are available at the door on the nights of the performances.